Notes on Heartbreak: From Vogue’s Dating Columnist, the must-read book on love and letting go

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This stunning exploration of love and heartbreak from cult journalist and Vogue columnist Annie Lord, is so much more than a book about one singular break-up. It is an unflinchingly honest account of the simultaneous joy and pain of being in love that will resonate with anyone who has ever nursed a broken heart. There will always be things only your ex would get, such as how typical it is that your parents have rearranged the living room so it “feels more open” even though now none of the sofas point towards the TV. You could try telling them but, for the third time, you will just end up sleeping together. Corners of the brain that cause and respond to addiction can be activated by images or reminders of ex partners

Accepting that there were two of you in the relationship and that the end was not necessarily all your fault can be a liberation. Relationships are nuanced and a product of two people’s entire life stories until that point. They are multifaceted and intricate and layered. We can still be sad about the end, whilst also beginning to recognise the complexity of love and loss rather than a prolonged and painful fixation on our own inadequacies. Róisín Ingle Heartbreak is one of the most painful life experiences we have and we need to take it seriously for our mental and physical health’: science journalist Florence Williams. Photograph: Casie Zalud It's a book about the best and worst of love: the euphoric and the painful, the beautiful and the messy. This stunning exploration of love and heartbreak from cult journalist and Vogue columnist Annie Lord, is so much more than a book about one singular break-up. This book spoke to my heart and the biggest infliction made against it. Encapsulating the trajectory of a broken heart, Lord put her own organs on the operating table and allows us to bear witness to her pain and, in it, find some solidarity on this unfair rite of passage.

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It is an unflinchingly honest reminder of the simultaneous joy and pain of being in love that will resonate with anyone that has ever nursed a broken heart. Here’s one of those quotes you could print and hang on the wall of your bedroom next to that small, misplaced mirror: I wonder how it feels for Williams, for her identity to have become so entwined with heartbreak and the very worst moments of her life. She loves it, she says. “I love that I’ve been able to help so many people, that I’ve helped make big emotions something we can feel a little more comfortable with. I absolutely believe vulnerability leads to connection and growth.” Through going deep into heartbreak she has found, she tells me, “a sense of purpose”. Reeling from a broken heart, Annie Lord revisits the past – from the moment she first fell in love, the shared in-jokes and intertwining of a long-term relationship, to the months that saw the slow erosion of a bond five years in the making. Annie Lord: I think, at that point, all I could think about was the breakup. I write in the book about how distraction from a breakup doesn’t help at all. You just end up feeling like you’re thinking about it even more. So I could only write about the breakup, basically. Writing about it really helped because it felt like I was still sitting in bed crying all day, but now it was also work. It wasn’t something I consciously thought about like, ‘I will be open about this and help people.’ But I was really surprised when loads of people were enjoying it. Because I guess when you’re in a breakup, you always think whatever you’re going through is so unique and romantic and special and different. It was nice because everyone was saying, ‘oh my god, I felt exactly the same!’ but it was also frustrating: I was thinking, ‘did you [feel the same]? Because I think I was feeling it more!’

I think we don’t take the grief of heartbreak particularly seriously as a society, relative to how devastating it actually is. I noticed a lot of the literary references you cite in the book to express your feelings were originally written about grief as we traditionally understand it – linked to bereavement. Perhaps some will think that’s overdramatic. Do you think grief is the right framing for how a breakup feels? Their conversation was so close to the themes and content of the book I’d just finished that later, as I left the train, I told the blue-haired woman that she must read it. “You have to read Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord when it’s out,” I said and instead of being annoyed that a random middle-aged stranger had eavesdropped on her conversation, she grasped the information like a life raft. “I will,” she said. “Thank you.”

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Writing about break-ups can be difficult because they’re so universal, but also deeply subjective. Your world might feel as though it’s collapsing, but to the next person, it’s just another break-up. If one person knows how to write about modern relationships and heartbreak though, it’s Annie Lord, Vogue columnist, VICE writer and now author of Notes On Heartbreak, her debut book, out today. She writes about intimacy in a way that’s relatable, poetic and makes you think that maybe your own heartbreaks are really as quietly earth-shattering as you thought they were. Notes on Heartbreak is a love story told in reverse. It begins with Lord recalling the moment her boyfriend, called Joe in the book, broke up with her on the side of the road after a family dinner. “I want to be on my own,” he said before walking away, leaving Lord reeling from the sudden ending of the five-year relationship. The book is cleverly structured and written with unflinching honesty. Lord revisits the relationship from their first encounter on the way to a lecture at University in Newcastle to their first dates, a fantastic sex life and comfortable domesticity after they moved in together. Notes on Heartbreak will probably be adored by the legions of fans of Dolly Alderton, who’s own wildly successful memoir Everything I Know About Love has recently been made into a television series. “I’m a big fan of Dolly and she’s been very supportive,” Lord says. I learned that everything you are feeling, they are, too. It’s a shame you can’t talk to them about it, because you would have a lot in common. Problem is, you’d just end up sleeping together.